The Future of Consumerist

Over the last twelve years, Consumerist has been a steadfast proponent and voice on behalf of consumers, from exposing shady practices by secretive cable companies to pushing for action against dodgy payday lenders. Now, we’re joining forces with Consumer Reports, our parent organization, to cultivate the next generation of consumer advocacy.

Stay tuned as Consumerist’s current and future content finds its home as a part of the Consumer Reports brand. In the meantime, you can access existing Consumerist content below, and we encourage you to visit Consumer Reports to read the latest consumer news.

This holiday weekend, Amazon quietly made some changes to their sales ranks, removing selected gay and lesbian books from the site-wide rankings and from some search results. What books were “selected” and speculation as to why they were selected has led to an online uproar.

Besides the one thing they have in common, the de-ranked books are all otherwise diverse, ranging from romance novels to serious nonfiction books; policy analysis to teen novels. Amazon should have learned by now that they really can’t do this sort of thing these days unnoticed.

When author Mark Probst noticed popular gay romance novels disappearing from the sales rankings and contacted Amazon about it, they explained their logic thusly:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Oh. Well, that explains it…hey, wait a minute! Why are books with little to no sexual content flagged as “adult” and losing their position in the sales ranks? Why do much dirtier books about heterosexual characters or people still have their sales rank? What, exactly, is Amazon up to here? It’s unclear, and that’s making people mad.